In the most recent article on telescopes, you had a look at Newtonian reflectors, the oldest type of mirror-based telescope for astronomy. Newtonians, as you learned, have one big drawback: they are big. Because they use a single primary mirror to direct light back to a flat secondary mirror, which in turn reflects light to the eyepiece at the side of the tube, the physical length of a Newtonian is roughly equal to its focal length. So a 12″ aperture f/6 Newtonian, for example, is at least six feet long and more than a foot wide. But in 1672, shortly after Issac Newton developed his famous design, an obscure French Catholic priest named Laurent Cassegrain invented a reflector that used two mirrors to fold a long optical path into a much shorter tube. Now many reflectors, and nearly all professional astronomy telescopes, use some variation of the Cassegrain design [Read more…] about Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescopes
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